I Can-Able MySelf
by Iam Ouroboros
We live in times when just about everything exists but almost nothing matters. It is a dislocated, distorted, dissociative, dispirited, and disingenuous time when almost everything and everyone has been tainted, tamed, absorbed, and consumed. But only I can truly nourish mySelf. Those of rare and of the finest quality are few, but they may add some spice, certain flavors, and textures to my life, and may even intricately co-conspire in a decadent feast of unique and kindred delight. But only I alone can-able mySelf.
I walked into Walmart today for some random tool to negotiate this atrociously disconnected world and was grossly reminded that hope for this particular reality is beyond absurd. Once again, I was brutally and disgustingly reminded that this is the sad epitome of the herd eating the herd in a hyper-alienated self-slaughter and cannibalistic feeding of soulless slugs. Rolling around their carts, shopping for their daily fix of two-litered high fructose corn syrup, enormous bags of salty fluff, and other assorted processed crunchy food’ish materials of self-referential garbage. Dressed in warehoused plastic fashion that reflect their obedient emptiness, taken out of huge crates just off the boat with bloody childish fingerprints from the East and South. Enormous screen-creatures of the hand-held artificial meta-verse with barrels of empty snacks for the ever-hungry mouths that say nothing worth-while and mis-nourished asses to cushion their pathetic servile and spectating existence. I walked into Walmart today and was grossly reminded that these are not me. I am in the wrong place and time and it is all-too-clear that I am alone and need to constantly remember that I alone can-able mySelf.
I read a label on a box of breakfast cereal with ingredients I cannot pronounce until I get to a few different types of diminutive bi-products from the once sacred maize. I think of how it has been systematically and industrially stripped and degraded into a dead caloric vessel from the magical living entity it once was. I catch myself half-dazed and pondering those brutal, yet far more meaningful days of the Aztec Empire before colonization, during their festival celebrating the Spring Equinox when their captured slaves would be flayed alive and their skin, detached from the body, was worn by Aztec priests in the rite of neteotquiliztli, in which he became a living embodiment of Xipe Totec, the Flayed Lord. The flaying symbolized the husking of corn and the regeneration of fields. Hominy danced in broth with human flesh. I am not celebrating, just noting and juxtaposing. Brutal meaning, I suppose, is still more interesting and alive than flaccid nothingness. And yes, in this thought process, I can-able mySelf.
Perhaps there is another way and I start to imagine myself in a primitive hunt where my connection to nourishment and flesh and meaning was not mediated by priests or commodities, before or outside of this Leviathan. As I am drawing my bow, with my arrow aimed directly between the eyes of my prey, someone bumps into me and I am back to this horrific artificial reality and I am watching the modern slaves perform their unimpressive and profane duties. There are no authentic dances or feasts here, just marches to nowhere and engorging on nothing. While they will eventually go to their pre-fabricated boxes to consume high calorie emptiness and cultural nothingness and feast with disgustingly slobbish laps, chews, grunts, and groans on each other and on their own barely moving corpses in a desperate yet disturbingly automatonatic manducation, I am neither priest nor subject. No master. No slave. I am free and can-able mySelf to be alive and unique and robust. In an autosarcophagous and revolting act, both figuratively and literally, I will eat mySelf.
On my drive home I switch on the radio, and here they go again…victims and saviors push and pull their days and nights away. Performing their ritualistic roles. The victims take no agency for their lives, as everything and everyone else is to blame, to excuse them from responsibility, to cripple their ability to make choices that enrich their lives from within their authentic desires. The saviors also live for others, outside of their lives, serving the victims. Their motivations are derived from guilt, arrogance, and duty, but never from their own lives. The victim and the savior need each other. They feed on each other. They could not exist without one another. They are each other. The head eats the tail, but in an opportunistically parasitical way. And then a commercial interrupts to offer more of the same cannibalistic time-wasting drivel. They blend seamlessly into one another. It is all the same as it eats itself from the superficial skin and masks inward.
Switching the station, the shock-and-awe western chauvinist yells at me that filthy immigrants, the dirty faggots, and the eternally unclean godless are to blame for all of the world’s problems. He goes on to carve up and feast on the present with a distorted and agenda-colored memory of the past and an insanely opportunistic and over-simplistic vision for the future. His meal is a lie and it offers him only indigestion for us to hear and smell.
I punch the radio off and watch the world go by as I drive back home to my mountain sanctuary from this post-post-modern madness and my unsettled, frazzled, and frenetic mind makes up a little tune about digits and the digital in the long and tragic trajectory of humanity:
Opposable Thumbs
Defining humans
Deciding humans
Declining humans
Opposable Thumbs
From sticks to screens
From songs to memes
From tribes to scenes
Opposable Thumbs
From where it began
From animal to human
The snake eats its end
Opposable Thumbs
I feel so numb
How fuckin’ dumb
Opposable Thumbs
thumbs thumbs thumbs
numb numb numb
dumb dumb dumb
thumbs thumbs thumbs
As the deranged and clownish melody continues in my head it gets faster and faster, not realizing that I begin chewing on my fingernails. Faster and faster. Chewing and gnawing. Driving, humming, chewing. Driving, humming, chewing. By the time I reach the end of the gravel road to my cabin, far up the canyon, far from the rest of the world, I realize that I have chewed off both of my thumbs, chewed down to cute little nubs. Blood and tiny pieces of me-meat covers the steering wheel, the windshield, the dashboard, and the front seat of my old barely-running truck. My shirt is now dark red and kinda warm and fuzzy. I smile a satisfied and bloody smile and I see stringy droplets dripping down my cheeks and chin and teeth as I look into the rear-view mirror. The evening sun glimmers, coloring the scene in urine yellow, rusty orange, and blood red all around me. I am finally home.
And I think it will all be ok.
forum topic?
why???
nothing being asked???
not a question for the herd.
It should remain in the forum for cringe level alone.
no "cringe" you.
what exactly do you think is sooooooo "cringe" here?
not really expecting a reply, or at least one with anything specific, as is usually the case with people who use emoji-like abbreviated meaninglessness terms right out of the trending-scape.
but go ahead, prove me wrong, use your words now...
"emoji-like abbreviated meaninglessness terms"
> trending-scape
As I am drawing my bow, with my arrow aimed directly between the eyes of my prey, someone bumps into me and I am back to this horrific artificial reality and I am watching the modern slaves perform their unimpressive and profane duties.
We got ourselves a masterpiece right here fellas. Not at all a raving blog post by an alienated narcissist brought to our attention by bored moderators on anews with no Halloween plans
its called fiction. and i got BIG plans.
humanity is truly disgusting.
... said the incel.
not even close, by a fuckin' cumshot. oh user of dog-whistling tropes.
AND, i said humanity, there are still a few beautiful people.
Who ya talkin to, bud?
wow. this was fun. i'm dippin' out. clean up after yerself and turn out the lights
Have a nice time "dippin", bud
*trick-or-treatin
this has hurricane goon squad energy...
please expand, what is that? and what do you mean? seriously.
it's an old @news meme that i fished out of the gutter
there was another person who hung around a lot, seduced by perhaps some similar ideas?
evoking a human sacrifice and skinning ritual in walmart, there's a... very particular american flavour!
the eco-extremist fixation?
it seems more misanthropic than eco-extremist. not that either are a problem for me. look around.
I'm a little bit cooountry, i'm a little bit rock'n rooolll... hah!
thanks for explaining, and it is deliciously accurate. thanks for noticing.
It's cool prose! Tho from the title and imagery I can't get outta my head the thought of the author ourobos'ing himself...
It's poorly written and very uncool. The images on the fake zine cover (why is this a thing?!?) are okay but the font choice is as cringe as the writing, title, and pseudonym.
You can't sit with us.
who would want to sit with you?
very provocative. like it. picked it up as a zine in the bay area last month from the guy from Green Anarchy magazine, and other stuff like it. really liked the critique of Safer Spaces he had there. wow. GA brings back some memories and just a smidge of hope.
No you didn't
someone here thinks they know everything
Is that "someone" here with you right now?
i hope someone puts the "opposable thumbs" poem to music...john cale maybe?
i would agree, thumbs suck.
what’s with these comments? No one makes any sense anymore. I felt this read. I see myself in their words, the world as a whole, and at certain points my self awareness made me long to be like the author.
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